In poetry he was eclectic—devoted to the great classic singers of all countries. For Tennyson he had no great admiration—said he was the sort of boy who would be sent up for good once a week—and yet I have known the tears come into his eyes when he was quoting a stanza from the poems of some far lesser light. If he read aloud a favourite passage, something that touched his heart, his voice would break, compelling his listener to feel with him. What a lovable man he was! He was so sympathetic, so modest in talking of his own work, so generous in his estimate of that of others; deeply though unostentatiously religious, brave as a Bayard, devoted to duty, Sir Thomas Wade was one of those men in whom our public service is happily rich, men who for a mere pittance as compared with what they might have earned in other walks of life, and with very little prospect of high honours, are content to pass their lives in exile, making light of health, risking death as he often did, and sacrificing to the interests of the Empire all the attractions of social, literary and artistic life, happy only in the thought that they are spending themselves for their country. Wade was very much pleased when I told him of my ambition to learn Chinese and promised to help me as much as he could, and most kindly was that promise fulfilled, for in about a fortnight he brought me the first two or three sheets of a series of conversational exercises which afterwards developed into the “Yü-yen Tsŭ-êrh chi,” a book of the greatest value. It was the irony of fate that, essentially a scholar by nature, the line which his scholarship had taken forced him into an official groove, which was outside the scope of his wishes but from which there was no escape. He would have been so happy working at philology. He often used to express to me his longing to be at rest in some congenial seat of learning, there to pursue his studies and literary labours. His wish was gratified at last; but not before sticking manfully at his post he had become minister and K.C.B.; for when he retired in 1883, he settled at Cambridge, where he became professor of Chinese, with no pupils, as he lamented to me, and where twelve years later he died. One of my greatest treasures, which never leaves me, is a little old shabby Bible which he gave me at Peking fifty years ago. Dear Wade!